Schleyer et al. (“A Preliminary analysis of the dental informatics literature”, Adv. Dent Res 17:20-24), indicates a rise in the number of dental informatics papers in journals such as Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the Journal of the American Dental Association, and the Journal of Dental Education. 
Image segmentation is of benefit for dental applications such as computer aided design, diagnosis, and surgery. Various approaches have been proposed in recent years to address tooth segmentation. However, a number of researchers indicate a difficulty of tooth segmentation. For example, researcher Shah describes a method for automating identification of deceased individuals based on dental characteristics in comparing post-mortem images with tooth images in multiple digitized dental records (“Automatic tooth segmentation using active contour without edges”, 2006, Biometrics Symposium). One step in such a method is the estimation of the contour of each tooth in order to allow more efficient feature extraction. Extracting the contour of the tooth, however, proves to be a challenging task. In Shah's method, the task of tooth contour estimation is attempted using active contour without edges. This technique is based on the intensity of the overall region of the tooth image. Still other attempts, such as those described by Krsek et al. in the article “Teeth and jaw 3D reconstruction in stomatology” (Proceedings of the International Conference on Medical Information Visualisation—BioMedical Visualisation, pp 23-28, 2007); Akhoondali et al. in “Rapid Automatic Segmentation and Visualization of Teeth in CT-Scan Data”, Journal of Applied Sciences, pp 2031-2044, (2009); and Gao et al. in “Tooth Region Separation for Dental CT Images”, Proceedings of the 2008 Third International Conference on Convergence and Hybrid Information Technology, pp 897-901, (2008) fall short of what is needed to address the problem of tooth separation or dissection and segmentation and provide robust, repeatable performance.
Thus, it is seen that there is a need for a method that provides a better solution for teeth dissection without cutting through the teeth region of interest in a three dimensional dental image volume for tooth segmentation.